Does degree of partner’s extraversion affect children’s speech accommodation?

During conversations, individuals adapt their speech in response to their partners, a phenomenon known as 'speech accommodation'. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) suggests that this adaptation is employed to manipulate social distance, and it's influenced by the impression we have of our conversation partner. While there's a growing body of research on adults, little is known about how children accommodate their speech in conversations. Does the impression of partners also affect children’s speech accommodations? This study aims to expand understandings of child speech accommodation by investigating the effect of the perceived personality of the partner, particularly their degree of extraversion.
Previous studies showed a correlation between extraversion and specific speech patterns, e.g., individuals with higher extraversion tended to imitate F1 more with their speech being louder and faster. It remains unknown whether children perceive this correlation, leading to change in their production.
Natural conversations were collected from 28 pairs of Mandarin-speaking children aged 10 to 12. The children participated in a game where they collaboratively identified differences between their pictures using spoken language. Each difference was related to a keyword. After the game, they evaluated their partner’s extraversion using a five-point Likert scale. F1, F2 and f0 of the keywords were analyzed. The average values of other pairs were utilized as baseline. The study found a significant interaction between the comparison object (difference from partner vs. difference from baseline) and the partner's extraversion score for f0 (Df = 2, p < 0.001***), with no effect on vowel formants. Post-hoc analysis showed significant decrease of f0 difference from partner along with the increase of extraversion score, indicating that children were more likely to converge their f0 when they thought their partner was more extravert. The contribution to the expansion of CAT for children and the exploration of individual differences will be discussed.